It can be a frustrating and expensive endeavor to have to find healing outside of yourself. And I understand that God doesn’t cost money and definitely is the ultimate healer, but sometimes a person needs the hands of another person God created.

It all just seems so dangerous to me.

Because…for me it HAS been dangerous. On different levels it has been dangerous, and for a time it was the highest danger. I was severely injured in my search for healing…

Healing…Healing is such a painful word for me. When I think of healing I think of pain. It hurts. This is how it has been all of my life. From the time I was a tiny tot.

And I wonder…Is it this way for everyone? Does healing always hurt?

I am learning in therapy now that healing maybe doesn’t always have to hurt, and I feel so gifted to finally have found a therapist with such healing qualities.

Those same qualities scare me. Because…why?

Because people (I guess one in particular who was in the helping/healing field) with those seeming qualities have also hurt me the worst.

Eight years ago I was hurt by a psychotherapist severely. I…can’t really seem to ever find the words for it. I haven’t been able to tell about it. I can’t even really talk about it in therapy even now. The therapist who hurt me so badly lost his license, and I later found out that I wasn’t the only one hurt by him, but that hasn’t cured the hurt. It hopefully stopped him from hurting other people so much.

At times I don’t know how that psycotherapist/abuser isn’t sitting in prison right now. But at other times I can’t get the weight of it being my fault off of me. I can’t surrender fully to either side. If he had been a boyfriend or a stranger or even a family member maybe I could comfortably classify it better. But he was my therapist. It makes everything so confusing and it wasn’t an attack of brutal force, even though the force he used was more brutal, perhaps, than what is traditionally thought of as brutal.

What is rape? I’ve gone over this so many times in my mind. When the memories blast me it reaches right up into my throat and I can’t breathe. Do you know the feeling? It gags me from the bottom up.

And that is how I have lived this experience. Mostly silently.

I’m not really angry at the person/abuser who hurt me in my search for healing (from so many other abuses.) But I need to tell. This isn’t about wanting to hurt. This is about healing.

i need to put it outside of myself somewhere so big that when it’s there, it is clearly there–so clearly not inside of me anymore.

I am ready to say to a broader audience. “LOOK. LOOK AT THIS. This is what happened.” I’m getting stronger so that maybe even me, myself, can know what happened.

I’m hurting a lot. Oh my God, I am hurting a whole lot. Lots and lots and lots and lots more than I ever even thought I could…but what’s so strange about right now is that I also feel better.

I’m healing. Maybe?

Is this what healing is?

I’ve never put the words rape with what happened to me in those dark dark places and moments in that room with him.

And nobody else has ever spoken that word for me. Nobody.

Maybe it’s because I could never tell, so how could anybody ever know.

But then I go back to what constitutes rape and is there a difference between traditional rape and non-traditional rape? Lol, I never heard those terms before, but…I don’t know.

And what about emotional rape?

I guess nobody really cares about that.

I’m sad at myself that i didn’t prosecute him. I’m sad I didn’t have the strength to stand up and say, “No! You can’t get away with this!” and I’m sad I didn’t know better when it happened to begin with. He told me it was therapy. Healing.

I only told a few sentences of things to the licensing board and it was enough for them to revoke his license so I never had to tell it all.

I am proud of myself that I finally reported it to the behavioral sciences board 4 years after it actually all took place, but I’m not proud of how it all arose to consciousness.

I hurt at myself that I hated myself so much…and for so long.

Even now the hate episodes envelop me. I stagger through my life with it.

I’m tired of staggering. I want to be a woman and healthy and strong and available to people.

Available to myself.

A significant amount of my life has been devoted to just this one event. And there are so many others hurts that brought me to this “event” in the first place. Don’t I think it’s about time to be free? I do.

I think its strange how this blog almost seems to have run it’s course. It’s like it came to life and lived and breathed for a time and then when its work was done, it was done.

Where I am now: I’m not sure if it’s really done or just taking a nap or taking a short underwater swim.

But definitely it has not died. If it has moved on it is because it has evolved into something else. It’s transformed….I’m just sitting with myself mid transformation right now. My wings still aren’t quite ready…but they are ready, as in…growing.

Change does happen. I know it happens, I’m just not so used to changing for the better when it comes to my internal personal development.

There’s a part of me that wants to know exactly what has caused things to change so quickly recently, but there is a part of me that doesn’t want or need to know at all. There is a part of me that knows I quit grasping so strongly to MY story. I couldn’t hold onto it. So I can’t hold onto it. I’m just going to let it be.

There has been so much I have wanted to share, even in the last couple of days, but haven’t known how to say things. Stuff is shifting around. It’s not so much about naming light and dark now. It’s more about just living and being in the present moment of all of everything. All the amazing wonder of life, even the parts I don’t necessarily like or prefer.

This will probably sound like a weird analogy and it probably is, but it’s the first thing that popped into my mind so what do you expect?

Where I am with how I feel about the present moment is a little bit like my relationship with guacamole. As a kid and teenager I found the sight or even the thought of guacamole to be sickening and putrid. But then one day, sometime after I had my first daughter I heard myself saying things like, “Just because it’s green doesn’t mean it’s gross.” and “Try everything at least once.” And I took a non-judgmental bite of that loveliness called guacamole for myself. The rest is history. Delicious history.

So, like with eating guacamole, here I am taking bites of the present moment and living in it every day. Yum Yum!

Ok, it’s not a spot-on analogy but I’m hungry and want some guacamole right now. Sad I don’t have any at the moment, but I am at least present enough to know that I am hungry and I can do something to at least fix that, even if it isn’t by eating guacamole tonight.

I have the sudden need to apologize to anyone who is following my blog.

I am realizing that I think this is the place I have mostly been coming on the bad days. Don’t you know the places, the places we go? I rarely think I’m so special that I’m the only one in the world doing the things I do. So surely I’m not the only one who can understand about how sometimes when I feel or am a certain way I tend to end up in a certain recurrent place with it?

Whoa, was that convoluted?

I just mean, maybe I come here on the bad days because when I started this blog it was during some REALLY bad days. Could this be my bad day (sometimes even if it’s just a bad hour) place I might get drawn to sharing here during the bad times because of how it all started. I tend to get drawn back here to share the yucky parts of my days because I know it’s already established here that the yuck exists so I don’t have to go through explaining why I feel so yuck. Yuck yuck yuck.

But the truth is that this whole story isn’t yuck. And yes, the darkness and light are having it out mostly all the time lately, but this is sort of like a Diary of the Dark!

So, I’m not sure what to do about this realization. Will I be able to transform this residence?

I guess this is an example of the compartmentalizing of my entire life.

But if that is so, then this realization about what is happening here is a pretty big deal, right? And realizations don’t happen without light and light tends to not be dark, right?

So it would follow that light is here now!

Mostly I just want to clear it up to the masses (haha) that there is light in my world. It just doesn’t come here very often! lol! There is a big dark monster at the entrance of the door here…an extra battle to survive after the battle of surviving the hard times to begin with.

And sometimes, I’m just too tired and the dark gets grouchy about not being seen.

I am maybe a little bit like an Ogre. Like Shrek? It’s been a long time since I watched Shrek, but this blog is sort of like my big green monster that isn’t so nasty if given a chance.

I’m not sure, maybe this place is just another aspect of telling my story. And if I must have 15 different places to tell my story because there are that many different parts to it (and me) then I will be having a lot of fun on the last day of the year when I pop the cork and give a toast from 15 different champagne bottles!

Things have been wordless here because I don’t have any words for this.

It’s not all light and chocolate kisses.

It fucking sucks a lot.

I’m in a marriage that I’m trying to make work because I fucking NEED it to work. I’m not raising another child on my own, and when it comes right down to it I’m still at the level of a 17-year-old in some ways…the age I was when I got married to my first husband.

Sure, a lot of things are different. A LOT. I have two daughters now. And I’m older, yes. I’m older and have a lot more years of twisted bullshit that I’ve lived through. And when I say twisted, it’s really fucking twisted.

It’s so twisted I really don’t think anybody would believe me if I said it. Nobody would fucking believe.

I’m living with the recurrent memories of it a lot right now. My whole life is coming back to me and it feels like every time my life tries to come back to me it just gets fucked again.

Why? Maybe because I’ve never been really present in my decision making. So I’ve made some really bad decisions. And also because I’ve never been able to escape abuse in one form or another from the time I was a little girl.

My mother continued to abuse me until I got re-married almost 2 years ago. And then, even after that. It just ended 5 months ago when I was 3 days out of major surgery and she came after me to attack me and tried to leave my house with my 4 month old baby against my will.

I guess it takes a lot for me to finally have enough.

I’m upset today because my husband doesn’t care about me. He only cares about me in the ways he feels like caring about me, which is really not very caring at all. Emotional intimacy is zero. Sometimes it’s even a negative number.

I have never been with a person who could ever be with me. And maybe it’s because I couldn’t be with another person. I could only be fucked up.

But now things are changing. And it fucking sucks.

I live and I die all the time now.

I try to not feel the aloneness of my life. I try to put happy pictures up on Facebook so that my life will be as sweet as I want it to be. And sometimes it even works for a little bit.

But not for very long.

I guess I will always just live in my head. Because I can’t deal with me heart. My fucking heart. Fuck this stupid heart.

I’ve been fucked in my heart AND in my head, but I can deal with being in my head because I can move those parts around easier to make it livable. My heart is destroyed.

I’m sick of the rebuilding efforts.

Sometimes you just have to move away. Sometimes you just have to accept you’re living in a god damned fucking flood zone.

How many ways can I die while I’m still alive? I should write a book about the ways. I think it’s all I have to tell.

What is the point of continuing on to be in the light when you’re never going to get out of this place anyway? What is the point even?

I don’t want any fucking answers either. Because nobody has any fucking answers for me any other time.

It’s important to say here, since I have been gone some days, that the Light is with me. I don’t know how to explain, now, what it is that is happening, but there is change taking place. I could share some things now, but I can feel things at work and to attempt to explain it might be presumptuous. And like I’ve recently mentioned in another post, the Light sometimes just leaves you so filled with Awe that it leaves you speechless, but the presence and working of Light is so very clear.

I suppose I am a little cautious of it. Not cautious, as in “I’m scared.” but cautious, as in…I want to respect this space I am in. I’m sitting with it. I’m resting in it, although moving at the same time. I feel like I am in a moving meditation. I don’t intend to not share it, but for a moment I have to actually be in it.

I can say one thing. It is that I believe in prayer. Not in the formal sort so much, although I do believe in intentional time for prayer. But I more so believe in the lived prayer, the constant conversation of Life with Light

I don’t know the future. Often I am not even fully conscious of the past.

What is hard is not knowing if the things happening are lessons from darkness or light.

The most empty would be if these experiences were from neither.

But i believe in the Light, and unfortunately that means there is dark too.

I keep asking the Light, “How do I make this story yours?”

And maybe I’m just not there yet because I still think there’s something – I – can do to make it be so. The thing is, I’m pretty sure this story being His won’t have a whole lot to do with me at all.

I’m just living. I was put here to live. What if God simply put me here to live and breathe and just by living and breathing this story was His (or Hers…I am unsure about the gender thing with God and how that can be and such. What if God was a Her to me? Would She love me? Could a “Her” love me? Why don’t we come up with something better than Him or Her…I say Light…no gender and all genders.)

Something happened to me this afternoon that I don’t know how to put words to. At least not yet. And maybe a way I can gauge if something is from Darkness or Light would be if I’m able to talk about it, specifically. And maybe there are things from the Light that are just too awe inspiring for words, but it would leave me so lifted up so that there would be no question it was from the Light. The Darkness is so tricky. It’s nasty and devious and makes itself so confusing.

The Darkness leaves me jumbled and in pain.

The Light leaves me clear and energized.

The Darkness is confusing no matter how I try to make sense of it.

The Light just falls together even if I can find no reason that it would at all.

There is Darkness and Light. Right now they are both in my life. Battling. It is scary to be a breathing thing with this war. It is everywhere I go. It is in every relationship. Every doorway. The battle is scary to behold, to breathe through, to contain.

I pray that the darkness would see fit to leave soon. It is fighting hard.

It makes it so it is hard to call out to the Light. It makes it so dark and overtaking.

I have to keep calling and calling on the Light.

That is how the Light is. It is always there for you, but it doesn’t take control. The Darkness is always there. It’s disrespectful. It will do its work without asking or being asked. It barges in. It wrecks everything in its path to get at what it wants in you or out of you.

The Light…the Light is merely present and waiting on you. Like a Servant.

The Light teaches me to wait. The Light teaches me to be patient and the Light teaches me how to have an inward strength, even when I am demoralized and ransacked by Darkness.

The Darkness is immature. The Darkness wears costumes. It hates itself so much it can’t just be who/what it is. It has to disguise itself as something entirely -not- itself…As Light.

Darkness is an imposture .

Light is genuine.

Light does not have to fight itself.

Light sets me free.

Darkness, I see you for you. You may win for a while.But I’ve given my heart, my every everything to Light.